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Filtering out the fury: how government tried to gag web censor
critics

The Federal Government is attempting to silence critics of its
controversial plan to censor the internet, which experts say will
break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing
illegal material such as child pornography.

Internet providers and the government's own tests have found
that presently available filters are not capable of adequately
distinguishing between legal and illegal content and can degrade
internet speeds by up to 86 per cent.

Documents obtained by us show the office of the Communications
Minister, Stephen Conroy, tried to bully ISP staff into suppressing
their criticisms of the plan.

Senator Conroy has since last year's election victory remained
tight-lipped on the specifics of his $44.2 million policy but,
grilled by a Senate Estimates committee this week, he said the
Government was looking at forcing ISPs to implement a two-tiered
filtering system.

The first tier, which internet users would not be able to opt
out of, would block all "illegal material". Senator Conroy has
previously said Australians would be able to opt out of any filters
to obtain "uncensored access to the internet".

The second tier, which is optional, would filter out content
deemed inappropriate for children, such as pornography.

But neither filter tier will be capable of censoring content
obtained over peer-to-peer file sharing networks, which account for
an estimated 60 per cent of internet traffic.

Senator Conroy said Britain, Sweden, Canada and New Zealand had
all implemented similar filtering systems. However, in all cases,
participation by ISPs was optional and the filtering was limited in
scope to predominantly child pornography.

Colin Jacobs, chair of the online users' lobby group Electronic
Frontiers Australia said: "I'm not exaggerating when I say that
this model involves more technical interference in the internet
infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most
repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world."

Critics of the ISP-level filtering plan say software filters
installed by the user on their PC, which are already provided by
the government for free at netalert.gov.au, are more than
adequate.

Mark Newton, an engineer at Internode, has heavily criticised
the Government and its filtering policy on the Whirlpool broadband
community forum, going as far as saying it would enable child
abuse.

He said the plan would inevitably result in significant false
positives and degrade internet speeds tremendously. Those views
were subsequently widely reported by technology media and
blogs.

Although Newton identified himself as an employee of Internode -
as Whirlpool's rules stipulate - he always maintained his views
were personal opinions and not necessarily shared by the
company.

On Tuesday, a policy advisor for Senator Conroy, Belinda
Dennett, wrote an email to Internet Industry Association (IIA)
board member Carolyn Dalton in an attempt to pressure Newton into
reining in his dissent.

"In your capacity as a board member of the IIA I would like to
express my serious concern that a IIA member would be sending out
this sort of message. I have also advised [IIA chief executive]
Peter Coroneos of my disappointment in this sort of irresponsible
behaviour ," the email, read.

It is understood the email was accompanied by a phone call
demanding that the message be passed on to senior Internode
management.

Newton said he found the bullying "outrageous" and Senator
Conroy was "misusing his influence as a Commonwealth Minister to
intimidate a private dissenting citizen into silencing his
political views".

A spokesman for Senator Conroy said Newton's accusation that the
Government was promoting child abuse was "disappointing and
irresponsible". He said the purpose of the email was "to establish
whether Mr Newton's views were consistent with the IIA
position".

Ironically, Senator Conroy has himself accused critics of his
filtering policy of supporting child pornography - including Greens
Senator Scott Ludlam in Senate Estimates this week.

ACMA released a report in July detailing the results of
laboratory tests of six unnamed ISP-level filters.

Only one of the filters tested resulted in an acceptable speed
reduction of 2 per cent or less. The others caused drops in speed
between 21 per cent and 86 per cent.

The tests showed the more accurate the filtering, the bigger the
impact on network performance.

However, none of the filters were completely accurate. They
allowed access to between 2 per cent and 13 per cent of material
that should have been blocked, and wrongly blocked between 1.3 per
cent and 7.8 per cent of websites that should have been
allowed.

"Why would you want to damage the performance and utility of the
internet and not actually keep the bad stuff out anyway," said John
Lindsay, carrier relations manager at Internode.

In Senate Estimates, Senator Ludlam expressed concern that all
sorts of politically-sensitive material could be added to the block
list and otherwise legitimate sites - for example, YouTube - could
be rendered inaccessible based on content published by users.

"The black list ... can become very grey depending on how
expansive the list becomes - euthanasia material, politically
related material, material about anorexia. There is a lot of
distasteful stuff on the internet," he said.

Despite this, the Government - which distanced itself from the
tests by saying they were initiated by the previous government - is
pressing ahead with live trials of the filtering system and will
shortly seek expressions of interest from ISPs keen to
participate.

1224351430987-smh.com.auhttp://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/filtering-out-the-fury-how-government-tried-to-gag-web-censorcritics/2008/10/23/1224351430987.htmlsmh.com.auSydney Morning Herald2008-10-24Filtering out the fury: how government tried to gag web censor
criticsAsher MosesTechnologyBizTechhttp://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2006/09/25/th_censor_index-thumb__60x40.jpg